Main
Extended CV
This document is supplemental to Brian Davidhizar’s CV as an appendix.
Career Narrative
United States Marine Corps
Signals Intelligence: Spanish Cryptologic Linguist
2003 - 2008
Pursuit of the role:
- I spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on what I wanted to do after college while I was a student at Messiah University. The military option was one that I started considering my sophomore year. I started taking the idea more seriously my junior year. The Marine Corps was the only branch of service I ever considered. I suppose I wanted to be part of a highly esteemed organization that would live up to its reputation of instilling discipline, building character, developing leadership skills, and taking their work seriously. The September 11th attacks took place at the beginning of my senior year, and I elected to enlist, rather then put in an officer package, so I could go into intelligence and study languages.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- I assisted U.S. efforts in the fight against narco-trafficking. Anyone who understands the destructive impact of narcotics can understand why it was easy for me to derive a lot of meaning from the mission.
- Completed an A.A. in Spanish at the Defense Language Institute in August, 2005.
Learnings:
- What I learned in the Marines are lessons that will never decay. They are too numerous to be captured here, but I provide a few important ones listed in no order of precedence:
- How to endure and overcome challenges
- The importance of guarding your reputation
- There will always be another evaluation, let each of them be a learning opportunity.
- Perception is reality.
- Put others first. Humility is not weakness.
- There is such a thing as terrible leadership.
- Good leadership takes intentional effort and training.
- Not every fight is worth fighting, but when you do, know how to win.
Aspirations:
- I loved being a Marine. I thought I might stay in the Corps for a long time because I was good at it and I liked the way the uniform made me feel. I fell in love, though, and judged that the Marines was not an environment conducive for a healthy family life. I reflected on the coursework I enjoyed during my undergraduate studies and determined that I would pursue a career in financial analytics of some sort and with a specific eye toward the investments industry. I thought that an investments career would help provide for the family life we wanted. Really, I just wanted to make ends meet after getting out of the military.
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
Assurance Associate
Tysons Corner, VA
2008 - 2008
Pursuit of the role:
- I needed a job that would offer an income similar to the income I was earning in the military. PwC took me on primarily, I believe, because I had an active Top Secret security clearance and they had government contracts on which they thought I would be a good fit. From my perspective, however, they put forth very little effort in terms of training provision and I quickly judged that it was not in my best interest to be shell-holed into government contracting when my intent was to navigate toward an investments career.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- I assisted with audit work at Howard University in D.C. and then helped a government agency with audit preparations. I felt that very little of what I did made any sort of significant contribution to the overarching missions of these organizations. However, my time at PwC came with other important lessons (see learnings).
Learnings:
- I started to get a sense of how far behind I was of peers that had already been in the workforce for 5 years while I had been on military duty.
- I realized I lacked a deep understanding of basic everyday business tools (e.g. MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, etc.) and adopted strategies for building expertise in them.
- I began to understand that completing a graduate degree was paramount if I wanted to portray a seriousness about professional progression, so I studied hard while pursuing an M.S. in Accounting and Financial Management at the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC).
Aspirations:
- One of my classmates at UMGC was an associate at a Arthur Bell CPAs, a public accounting firm north of Baltimore that specialized in providing assurance and tax services to clientele in the alternative investments industry (e.g. hedge funds, commodity pools, funds of hedge funds, etc.). I thought joining a firm like that would be the perfect way to gain professional experience while simultaneously aligning my career with to the industry that most peaked my interest.
Arthur Bell, CPAs
Hedge Fund Audit Staff
Hunt Valley, MD
2008 - 2010
Pursuit of the role:
- I joined Arthur Bell CPAs as Audit Staff in June, 2008 after a short stint at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I had been studying Accounting and Financial Management at UMGC and I felt this role would give me more hands-on experience in the accounting field. I was also excited about moving closer to the investments industry, even if did not yet involve working for an investment manager directly.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- I helped complete audits of alternative investments partnerships (e.g. hedge-funds, commodity pools, funds-of-hedge-funds, etc.). I audited various parts of their financial statements to include both Balance Sheet and Income Statement items under the supervision of more tenured audit associates. As an independent auditor, our opinion as to whether any material misstatements existed helped give investors in the partnerships confidence that business was being conducted properly.
- Completed M.S. in Accounting and Financial Management from UMGC in May, 2009.
Learnings:
- Developed knowledge of the alternative investments industry
- Better understanding of and deeper exposure to financial statements
- Introduced to different types of financial securities traded by investment managers for different purposes such as equities, bonds, futures, forwards, options, swaps, etc.
- I learned that I enjoy structure around process. In other words, I learned that I like clear goals and systematic ways to go about achieving them. Auditing was often a direct, step-by-step process, so it was good to have this type of work at the introductory stage of my professional career.
Aspirations:
- Public accounting firms typically operate with a busy season, which entails extended working hours from January through April – usually 12-15 hours a day with some work on Saturdays as well. This arrangement was not sustainable from my point of view; I did not want to be working busy seasons that would preclude any chance of being present as a father. Additionally, I began to find the historic nature of audit work tedious; I wanted to be in a role that was more participatory: where I could help solve business problems. I thought that pursuing roles at Baltimore-based investment firms like T. Rowe Price or Legg Mason (recently acquired by Franklin Templeton) would provide a transition into direct employment by an asset manager.
T. Rowe Price
Sr. Mutual Fund Accounting Associate
Owings Mills, MD
2010 - 2011
Pursuit of the role:
- I had set a goal of working directly for an asset manager, so I searched for roles at T. Rowe Price that would be a good fit considering the skills I had acquired at Arthur Bell CPAs. I successfully managed to land a role in T. Rowe’s Portfolio Accounting department. I hoped that it would be a role that could provide future opportunities and multiple paths into other investment-related analytic roles.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- I had two primary responsibilities as a portfolio accountant. The first was to reconcile transactions (e.g. buy/sell trades, corporate actions, receipt of interest, etc.) in our systems to custodian records for fixed income portfolios. The second was to manage the distribution of corporate shares to institutional clients from their ownership interests in private equity and venture capital partnerships. T. Rowe Price investment staff would then manage the liquidation of the shares on the client’s behalf or hold them for eventual sale at a future date. I worked with T. Rowe Price Technology associates to build a more robust, controlled, and more automated system for booking these shares to reduce the probability of error. I also helped develop and improve MS Excel macros to automate certain elements of client reporting related to this particular client set.
Learnings:
- Gained familiarity with portfolio accounting systems.
- Built an understanding of the what goes on within an investment portfolio at transaction-level detail.
- Learned how investment managers, their clients, and their client’s custodian all work together to coordinate the processes that build wealth for the client.
- I realized I enjoy the rewards that accompany the refining of business processes.
Aspirations:
- After a year of serving as a portfolio accountant, I was eager to acquire exposure to more technical aspects of investing. I did not feel as if I had enough experience to apply for highly competitive positions on the investment staff without it. However, I knew other available roles at T. Rowe could provide an opportunity to build the type of knowledge that could give me a shot at an investment staff position in the future. I knew I wanted something that would provide the opportunity to learn about how to measure portfolio performance and how T. Rowe’s investment products compared to competing firms.
T. Rowe Price
Quantitative Investment Performance Analyst
Owings Mills, MD
2011 - 2015
Pursuit of the role:
- I successfully transitioned to a Quantitative Performance Analyst position in T. Rowe’s middle office. In this role I developed deep skills in investment portfolio analysis and trained portfolio analysts on portfolio analysis tool usage and data interpretation. I acquired a deeper knowledge of portfolio return calculation, Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), investment performance statistics (e.g. alpha, beta, tracking error, information ratio, sharpe ratio, etc.), portfolio benchmarks, and excess return attribution analysis.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- Provided CEO and Senior Members of Investment Staff with Lipper Ranking statistics and performance trends of all T. Rowe Price funds. This helped executives more closely monitor how T. Rowe’s product line compared to industry competitors on a day-by-day basis.
- Leveraged various software applications to supply returns-based style charts and MPT statistics to investment staff and marketing professionals. Maintained an understanding of how such statistics are being calculated by the tools. Providing this type of information provided greater transparency and awareness that T. Rowe’s investment strategies were behaving as intended.
- Utilized other software applications to perform attribution analysis and assist in the interpretation of such analysis with end-users as needed. This helped investment associates why their investment strategies were outperforming or underperforming their respective benchmark indices.
- Performed ad-hoc portfolio/universe ranking, competitor, and performance analyses using Morningstar Direct. Produced various (sometimes standardized) reports, and fulfilled such requests to end-users in a cognizant way. This helped provide timely information to investment associates so that they could operate at peak performance.
Learnings:
- Providing great support strengthens the entire team and makes everyone better.
- I discovered I enjoy teaching and training others.
- Acquiring technical expertise is valuable in itself and takes significant time and effort to build.
- I became aware of the vastness of the investments industry (i.e. the hundreds/thousands of managers world-wide who compete for the same pot of client assets changing hands at any given moment)
- Studied Applied Statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology (2011-2012) and transitioned into a Computational Finance Graduate Certificate program at the University of Washington (completed 2013).
- First started programming in R in 2013. I started realizing I may not have the passion or skill it takes to be a quantitative investor.
- Earned the Certificate in Investment Performance Measurement from the CFA Institute (2014).
Aspirations:
- After 31/2 years as a performance analyst, I reasoned that it might be beneficial to learn a different part of the business and support the institutional sales staff in their market research efforts. Maybe I could build relationships that would lead me into investments.
T. Rowe Price
Sr. Market Research Analyst
Baltimore, MD
2015 - 2016
Pursuit of the role:
- I went back and forth with the decision to accept the position offered to me supporting institutional sales associates. Ultimately, I elected to go through with it because I felt it would be beneficial to have a broader understanding of the firm instead of niche expertise in portfolio performance evaluation.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- I provided direct support to North America-based Global Institutional Sales, Consultant Relations, & Client Service teams and Global Marketing Initiatives.
- I helped provide background context on competing investment strategies to distribution associates so that they could be fully prepared for finals presentations and be better positioned to win institutional mandates.
- I started using data visualization tools like Tableau to present insights from underlying datasets instead of hacking through the data using MS Excel. Exhibiting the power of Tableau helped provide momentum to broader business intelligence initiatives that were just getting underway. Now several distribution units have mature data analytics teams.
- I established a high level of familiarity and comfort with industry platforms like Morningstar Direct, eVestment, and SIMFUND that contain AUM, asset flow, and peer-group performance ranking data.
Learnings:
- I learned how to work and meet deadlines in a demanding, high-tempo, sales environment.
- I started learning how to refine and simplify data presentations so that they could easily understood by people with little background knowledge. This helped improve speed of communication and understanding among fellow associates and clients.
- I helped develop a way to identify “weak managers” in various market spaces that were susceptible to being fired. This helped our organization identify opportunities where we might replace the incumbent and win more mandates.
Aspirations:
- Working alongside the distribution associates was not my favorite. I did not feel as if my values were aligned with the culture of the group. It was a money culture I was unfamiliar with and did not know how to navigate. I realized that I certainly did not aspire to become a distribution representative. However, before beginning any sort of broader search for a new role, there were other enterprise-level developments taking place that would dictate how I would contribute to T. Rowe’s growth in the coming years.
T. Rowe Price
AVP, Product Analyst
Baltimore, MD
2016 - 2018
Pursuit of the role:
- Commentary under development.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- Commentary under development.
Learnings:
- Commentary under development.
Aspirations:
- Commentary under development.
T. Rowe Price
VP, Sr. Manager, Data Analytics
Owings Mills, MD
2010 - Present
Pursuit of the role:
- Commentary under development.
What I helped accomplish and why it mattered:
- Commentary under development.
Learnings:
- Commentary under development.
Aspirations:
- Commentary under development.